Students who transfer schools often do worse in school than those who
don't transfer. The McKinney-Vento Act can help solve this problem by
allowing students to stay in the same school and get free transportation.

Data Entry

Districts must indicate in their student management systems students who experience homelessness at any point during the year. This guide specifies which codes relate to students identified under the McKinney-Vento Act.

Districts are encouraged to check in with parents whose children are McKinney-Vento eligible (or youth themselves in the case of unaccompanied homeless youth) at the end of each school year to determine whether their housing situation has changed and make appropriate arrangements for the next school year if there has been a change. This template letter can be used to reach out to families for this purpose.

Data on Homelessness
in New York State

SIRS Data on Student Homelessness

These spreadsheets contain data on the number of students who experienced homelessness at any point in the indicated school year. The data were collected by the New York State Education Department in the Student Information Repository System (SIRS) and reflect students enrolled in New York State School Districts and New York State Charter Schools.

BEDS Data on Student Homelessness

Data on students experiencing homelessness were collected in the Basic Educational Data System (BEDS) prior to 2009-10. This spreadsheet contains BEDS data on students who experienced homelessness, collected from New York State School Districts and New York State Charter Schools in 2007-08 and 2008-09.

Please contact Emily Kramer with any questions about data on students experiencing homelessness.

Local Poverty Rates & Student Homelessness

Poverty data can be a useful tool for districts in estimating the approximate number of students who may experience homelessness. According to the Urban Institute (2001, available here), approximately ten percent of children living in poverty will experience homelessness in a given year. Poverty data can be accessed through the U.S. Census Bureau.

Please note that there are many factors outside of poverty that contribute to homelessness (for example, natural disasters, house fires, domestic violence) that may affect the reported number of homeless students. These data should not be viewed as quotas but as rough guidelines to assist school staff and service providers in thinking about the possible prevalence of homelessness in a community.

New 2016-17 Data! This spreadsheet includes data broken down for each NYS school district with the following information:

Estimated number of children ages 5-17 (school-age children) living in poverty (2016 data)

10% of children ages 5-17 living in poverty

Total number of students identified as homeless by the district (2016-17 data)

Number of students possibly under-identified as homeless

The poverty data come from the U.S. Census Bureau. The homeless data come from the State Education Department. The number of students possibly under-identified was calculated by subtracting the homeless data from the 10% of children living in poverty data.

ED Data Express includes data from EDFacts, Consolidated State Performance Reports (CSPR), State Accountability Workbooks, the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), the College Board, and the Department's Budget Service office.

This website provides data in an easy-to-use online database format. It allows you to generate custom graphs, maps, ranked lists, and state-by-state profiles on a variety of indicators of child well-being.

Workshops and Training Materials

NYS-TEACHS is housed at Advocates for Children and is funded
by the
New York State Education Department. The content of this website does
not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the New York State
Education Department. This website was produced with funding from the
New York State Education Department.